Imagination Technologies, the UK-based chipmaker, lost 70 percent of its market share overnight and it really only has itself to blame.

For those who came in late, this week out of the blue, Apple announced it was developing its own graphics unit for iPhone and iPad to improve their computer graphics quality.

Doing this shafted Imagination which had been its long term business partner for years. It gave Imagination two years notice before saying so long and thanks for the all the fish.

Imagination is going through the various stages of rejection including self-denial. It is releasing statements claiming that Apple cannot do without it and it will still need its IP to continue its own graphics chip development.

But this does not answer the main problem – Imagination had allowed itself to become too dependent on a single customer which has a history of ending its business relationships, or strong arming price cuts from its partners.

Qualcomm had also received this treatment from Apple. Jobs’ Mob was unhappy with the fact that it would not drop its modem prices so it defected to Intel. Intel’s modems were not as good, but it was prepared to offer a price that Apple was happy with. Qualcomm still have not budged, but then the company was not as dependent on Apple as Imagination was.

A similar game was played with Samsung over its OLED tech. Samsung is the maker of the technology but Apple started flirting with China’s BOE Tech instead.

Today it appears that Samsung gave into whatever Apple wanted and received an order for 70 million OLED screens as its reward.

If Apple could force a big outfit like Samsung to bend, then Imagination had no chance at all. What the company should have done is seen the writing on the wall a long time ago and tried to get rid of its Apple dependence.

That was particularly last year when it became obvious that Apple’s iPhone numbers were falling. Apple’s business plan is fairly clear. Iphone sales are falling and will probably not return.

To keep milking its cash cow, it has to reduce costs by using cheaper components or forcing its existing suppliers to give them a bigger discount.

This means that when the slower sales results are shown to the world, Apple will still be claiming “record profits” and higher margins.

All this will be at the expense of companies, like Imagination, who should be doing a lot better.

Part of the problem is that the press has tended to see companies who were working with Apple as “doing well” rather than being forced to drink from a poison chalice of discounts and dependence on a single customer.

In fact, some analysts believed there could be room for compromise with Imagination as this could be a bargaining move by Apple to reduce royalties.

However, Imagination would be far better ignoring Apple completely and suing it into a coma if it uses anything like its technology. There are other places Imagination could sell its products, and really should use this current wave of Apple manipulation to give the outfit the cold shoulder. If Apple thinks it can develop GPUs then let it learn the hard way that it cannot.

It is worth pointing out that the only company which has done well out of this sort of relationship with Apple has been Foxconn.

According to the latest report which suggests that Nvidia partners will not sell the €319 priced GTX 1060 Founders Edition, Nvidia has finally announced the European MSRP for the Geforce GTX 1060, set at €234 exc. VAT.

According to Paolo Corsini from HWUpgrade.it, the suggested retail price for the Geforce GTX 1060 is set at €234 + tax, which is a minimum suggested price for Nvidia partners, although plenty of custom GTX 1060 versions will be selling above that mark. As it does not include the tax, the price will range from anywhere between €280 to €300 depending on the country since taxes range from eight percent to 27 percent in some countries.

The same report said that the GTX 1060 Founders Edition will only be sold by Nvidia via its German, France and UK websites and will cost €319. This is a big surprise and a different move compared to back when GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 were launched. It also means that Nvidia partners are free to work on custom versions which could be available from day one.

Currently, the AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB can be found for €269 in most of the Europe so Nvidia GTX 1060 should provide at least some performance improvement in order to be a valid competitor. Unfortunately, official reviews will be available on July 19 when Nvidia's NDA on performance numbers will be lifted. We will surely keep an eye on retail/e-tail when the GTX 1060 officially becomes available.

Intel has teamed up with Microsoft’s sworn enemy VMWare to deliver a platform for "trusted cloud."

The technology will mix Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and VMware's vSphere 5.1, platform for building cloud infrastructures. Intel said its hardware-enhanced security capabilities integrated directly into the processor combined with vSphere 5.1 would provide a hardened and high-integrity platform to run business-critical applications in private and public cloud environments.

Chipzilla thinks that the biggest barrier to cloud adoption is the fact that companies are worried about security. Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel's Cloud Infrastructure Group, in a statement that Intel TXT provides hardware enforcement to help overcome some of the most challenging aspects of cloud security, including detection and prevention of bios attacks and evolving forms of stealthy malware, such as rootkits.

Using VMware vSphere 5.1 support of TXT is essential to building a foundation of trust in virtualized infrastructures and the cloud and is ready for deployment. In cloud datacenters, servers are typically virtualized and shared across multiple departments or customers and are no longer dedicated to specific lines of business, creating new security concerns, Intel said.

Lenovo defector and newly appointed AMD CEO Rory Read seems to be a riddle for many market watchers and vendors alike.

We don’t know him well to make any comments and we've only seen one motivational video where he wants to boost his employees' confidence. The good news is that Read is meeting with many long time AMD customers and some of them are telling us that the chap is on the right track and that he knows what he is doing.

The changes he is making at AMD should be good in the long run and other industry sources from graphics side of the business are confident that graphics will remain a strong business unit for AMD. If you look at it, graphics are still doing quite well, compared to the CPU business.

AMD should have 28nm graphics in January and, as far as we know, AMD could launch its 28nm Radeon HD 7000 graphics line even in late November / early December, but TSMC would not be able to produce enough chips to meet the Xmas demand.

It would just destroy the sales of Radeon HD 6000 series products that are still going strong and hurt overall Q4 graphics sales. Let’s see what Rory makes of this Obama-like “change we can believe in” strategy, as change is the key word that we are hearing all the time.

The announcement means man a good thing for Microsoft, as it covers pretty much all the TV and internet tube content you’ll need. On the other side of the fence, Google on will not be so happy, as Google TV is yet to report any serious mainstream adoption.

Microsoft’s list of partners is as follows and, as you can see, Google better have an ace up its sleeve.

Recently, we told you about the announcement that THQ was getting into third-party publishing in a big way with its own THQ Partners Program.

Basically, it is the same thing that Electronic Arts and Activision have already been doing with their partner publishing programs where the studio controls the IP, core design, and, of course, the funding. EA or Activision will handle the duplication, inventory and distribution.

THQ has already done a couple of deals, including the Jellyvision deal, which will see the You Don’t Know Jack franchise return as well as the latest game from Itagaki-san’s latest game, named Devils Third.

Apparently, that isn’t all. Our sources tell us of a couple more titles that are set to be announced that come from high profile talent. We don’t know much more than that, but we are told it is people that you will certainly recognize.

We expect the actual announcement in a couple of weeks as soon the final contracts are completed.